Survival Tips for Women in Tech
patricia.no
patricia.no
Maybe it’s easier to accomplish this outside the Valley, but despite being a woman engineer I’ve never had to explicitly choose any of these positions.
Why not? Because I’ve always worked places where I was taken seriously and treated professionally. It is possible (and at least in NYC, not at all difficult) to find and choose workplaces and teams with high standards of workplace professionalism. Where people know better than to suggest team building in a sauna.
It also is a good idea to have an emergency fund that will allow you to say “fuck this” and walk out of any job where they lack that professionalism, but in 15-ish years I’ve yet to sign on to such an environment in the first place.
That such toxic environments seem to be so prevalent in SV is infuriating in part because it’s so clear that it doesn’t have to be that way.
Even as a guy, I have personally witnessed that it is the norm, and that most organizations that have managed to avoid being sexist by default are very special indeed.
There is some bias that makes people (men) want to believe that “it can’t possibly that bad, or if it is, it can’t possibly be that common”. Be aware of this bias.
Almost all of these pieces of advice function for anyone, and those specifically about women can be translated for any trait "X" - minority group or even something-common-but-not-here. I've gotten typecast because I like videogames - Freaking everyone likes videogames.
But you must have noticed that social media feeds on outrage? People amplify the extent of things they are shocked by, by sharing and upvoting. Looking at the amount of noise generated in media/social-media would be a very poor way of measuring the true extent of anything, but especially of something so politicized as harassment of women.
It was very difficult for me to adjust as a new engineer, including with code reviews and all that, and I wonder if I had an outsider identity how tempting it would be to blame my problems on that. Never being sure if the difficulty was because of prejudice or not. Probably one of the worst effects of discrimination, causing you to have suspicion and doubt all the time because it might really be warranted.
Anyway, a lot of these tips are just in general pretty good advice, even for a guy. And an environment that is friendly to women and that makes her advice unnecessary is better environment for everyone to work in.
14) Introduce Rules for Communication, like praise in public, criticize in private
To be clear: I agree with talking about the problem and not the person. But,is it a good idea to push rules on others group before any consensus there is a problem? Especially as new person in an existing group? Especially as first women, comfirming the stereotype women care more about social than technical aspects.
This tip might be a reasonable idea to try in specific situations, but stated as is, I don't think can agree. Maybe it's just the wording, though.
Engineering is stressful enough. No need to drive people away faster than necessary. Private criticizing can be delivered directly to offending person, especially if you're a team lead or manager, or it can be delivered to your manager. If it's significant enough to result in actionable items then the situation will be handled one way or another. Meanwhile if the person is capable of resolving the issue after your private criticizing they'll often respect your decision to keep things professional. Heck, sometimes there's an entire bag of worms under the surface like serious family problems they're going through outside of work at that same time that explains their behavior, something you almost certainly wouldn't find out with public criticizing.
I've seen some significant turn arounds from previous team members after some pointed private talks. Alternatively, I've seen people dig in their heals and become a problem team member after improperly timed public shamings.
Doesn't this just put you in your own bubble? Can all criticism be so easily dismissed?
It's just a majority/minority thing.
As a caveat, it is still a pretty privileged position to be a white person, even in Japan. I think non-white foreigners have a much harder time there.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/06/09/all-debates-are-bravery...
I've left companies for some of these situations/items and I'm financially better off.
"Document your work" is very, very important. And be very careful about how documenting your work can go sideways. For instance, I once wrote extensive documentation for a wiki. The documentation was moved during a reasonable re-org of the wiki, but the new "bye-line" was now the person who restructured the wiki. I don't think there was anything insidious going on there, but it can happen. Another thing is when a GitHub repository is moved, or a new team is involved. Sometimes it makes sense to just create a new repo from scratch, but when it happens, your name and history may be removed from your code. I think a lot of this may simply be due to the immaturity of our field (literally and figuratively). Even if it isn't sinister, in most publishing, it's a big deal to take a writer's name off a piece and replace it with whoever copy and pasted the piece to a new location. Unfortunately, this does happen with code and documentation quite often. It's also wise to document in multiple places - write up a blog post, do an in office presentation with slides, speak at a conference if you can. All this is very good advice.
It is inconceivable to me that an actual company event would take place at a strip club, and events that would require dressing in a bathing suite seem unlikely. A sauna? Woah. This is a thing? (NOTE: I'm kinda old for tech).
Well... I suppose river rafting is a possibility. I'm in my late 40s, and I spent my earlier years in large boring corps or universities. When a startup shows a large group photo of a group of 20 somethings on a weekend hiking trip, I get it, it means older people who coach their kid's baseball team on the weekend should probably look for a job elsewhere. I've yet to see a big picture of them all in the sauna, though. Yikes.
There's a lot of good general info here. But on to the interesting thing about women in tech I mentioned above. It's possible to see the problems afflicting women in tech as specifically afflicting women - that it's an bro-tastic place for men, but crappy for women. Another way to see it is that the problems women experience shine a particularly bright light on what is so horrible about this industry.
I think a big part of the problem is that there is a billion dollar industry around convincing young people that tech is a wonderful career and the only problem is that there's a shortage of people who realize how wonderful it is and want to become software developers in Silicon Valley. The reality is that there's something very rotten in tech. I certainly don't think it's a paradise for men, by a long shot, but I also don't have any real trouble believing that what's already unpleasant enough for the gander is particularly crap-tastic for the goose.
I mean if you're a woman who wants to go to hooters then by all means go to hooters, but be who you are not one of the guys.
#3 is not always true, I've worked at some companies where HR actually has power and is an ally of employees, but yeah in the majority of companies they are effectively rubber stamps for whatever the CEO says regardless of ethics or legality. In those organizations just know that HR is your enemy, not a resource.